This could be the one!

Back in September of last year, I was wondering about apps that might help with the writing process.  At the time, I was looking at StoryPlanner, which is good and interesting and certainly helpful.  Is it The One? Is it the solution to every writing problem you may encounter?  No, but I’ve now found something that comes pretty close – Scrivener.

First up, I need to say that I’m not affiliated to Scrivener in any way.  I’ve bought my own copy and they don’t know that I’m writing this.  I need to declare all that up front because what I’m about to say is very positive and you could easily mistake it for a sales blurb. 

Scrivener has been around for ages — since 2007, to be precise — and I even think that I’d looked at it back then and thought that I’d stick with Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter – because that was the business I was in and those two programs were the industry standards.  But now that I’m writing novels, it’s a whole new world.  Scrivener is the program of choice of my best friend Graham, a far better novelist, by the way, than I will ever be.  He’s also extremely clever and a whizz with computers and IT, so when he said that Scrivener was great but had ‘quite a steep learning curve’ I was immediately concerned.  I blame my ADHD but I’m not good at reading instructions of any kind.  One very early screenplay formatter, called Scriptor, had a manual that was thicker than War and Peace!  Needless to say, I never even loaded it onto the hard drive.  I’m happy to report that Scrivener is nowhere near as challenging.

So, what does it do?  Let’s get the obvious out of the way first – it’s a writing program, just like Word, with the ability to export your manuscript in many formats, including .docx and PDF.  But there are hundreds of competing programs that can do this; what is it that sets Scrivener apart?  That answer to that is that it’s the way everything is organised and the flexibility that naturally flows from that organisation.  The program is based upon the idea of a ring binder, the place where you would put everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – associated with your writing project: notes, corkboard, outliner, research, photographs, character sketches, locations, useful web pages and, of course, your manuscript itself.  Scrivener does all of that – and you can access everything from your computer screen in a variety of forms and formats.

I’m still learning how it all works but I can already see that by pulling everything together and providing the linked filing system that organises it all, I’m avoiding losing those notes that I scribbled on the back of an envelope or the notebook that I’ve put down somewhere and now can’t find.  It’s as though I’ve got a very efficient PA silently sorting everything out for me!  And it’s already changed the way that I write.  Previously, I’ve always written entirely chronologically – I’ve just started at the beginning and worked through to the end.  With Scrivener, it’s just as easy to write a section from any part of the story because the program will organise it, seamless integrating separate files without the need to cut and paste.  Got an idea for the perfect ending?  Write it now!

I won’t go into hands-on detail because I don’t have the space and others have already done it a lot better and more clearly than I could ever do but let me at least clarify the description: Scrivener is not complicated so much as complex.  There are lots of things that the program can do for you but you might not need all of them.  Even at its most basic level, it feels as though it offers more than most programs.  My advice is to watch a few of the many YouTube videos and see if it’s for you.  Meanwhile, back to that wholly new experience of writing whatever comes to mind – wherever it is in the narrative.

Happy writing!